A living organism is made up of cells. Cells are the smallest structures capable of maintaining life and reproducing. Cells have differing structures to perform different tasks. A tissue is an organization of a great many similar cells with varying amounts and kinds of nonliving, intercellular substances between them. An organ is an organization of several different kinds of tissues so arranged that together they can perform a special function.
Surgery is defined as a branch of medicine concerned with diseases requiring operative procedures.
Although many surgical procedures are successful, there is always a chance of failure. Depending on the type of procedure these failures can result in pain, need for re-operation, extreme sickness, or death. At present there is no reliable method of predicting when a failure will occur. Most often the failure occurs after the surgical procedure has been completed. Failures of surgical procedures can take many forms. The most difficult failures to predict and avoid are those that involve biological tissue. This difficulty arises for three distinct reasons. Firstly, the properties that favor the continued function of biological tissue are very complex. Secondly, these properties are necessarily disrupted by surgical manipulation. Finally, the properties of biological tissues vary between people.
During a surgical operation, a variety of surgical instruments are used to manipulate biological tissues. However, traditional surgical instruments do not have the ability to obtain information from biological tissues. Obtaining information from the biological tissues that surgical instruments manipulate can provide a valuable dataset that at present is not collected. For example, this dataset can quantitatively distinguish properties of tissues that will result in success or failure when adapted to specific patient characteristics.
Surgical instruments that incorporate sensors onto the instruments' working surfaces are described, e.g., in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/510,940 and in U.S. Pat. No. 5,769,791. The instruments described in the prior art have the ability to sense tissue properties; however, their utility is limited by an inability to account for the multitude of differences that exist between patients. This limitation of the prior art is clearly illustrated by the fact that the instruments generate feedback after sensor signals are compared to a fixed dataset within the device. Thus, the prior art instruments have no means of adapting to patient-specific characteristics that are of utmost importance in avoiding surgical procedure failure.
There exists a need for a system and methodology for using the information gathered by surgical instruments having sensors in an adaptive, patient-specific manner. There also exists a need for instruments having sensors that are useful for monitoring a patient's condition during and after surgery.